Lunch Break (by Ashley Spencer-Phillips) is the first real “indie-game” we’ve reviewed in a while and it really reminds us of just how hard it is to make a game when developing solo.
Set at what must be the worst pixelated park bench in history, (you’ll soon see why), your mission in this game is to seemingly defend Chris’s lunch break from the devil Satan himself! Anything that could possibly go wrong does in his game. 😂
Played using a series of 4 buttons in order to – Swap Sides on your bench in order to avoid falling “gifts” from pigeons flying above, Kick massive rodents trying to steal your lunch, frantically Swat Away football sized bees with nothing better to do than sting your face, and lastly Duck to avoid overly enthusiastic football heads from tossing balls at your head, it would be an understatement to say that this game is tricky.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot there is also an Eat button you’ll get to use during boss battles.
Although this is roughly 5 times as many buttons to remember as found in most hyper-casual games on the market, it would still be do-able if it weren’t for the fact that the obstacles you are faced with seem to be randomized which makes the game “feel” impossible… Or at least that’s what we thought in our original review.
After reading our review and the struggles we faced as our overworked review team tried desperately to defend Chris’s happiness, Ashley (the developer) had mercy on us and actually went so far as to add a second game mode into Lunch Break! 😲
Lunch Break now features both a “Normal” mode as well as an “Expert” mode that is obviously much more difficult. Normal mode gives players fewer obstacles to deal with, allowing noobs like ourselves to build up the skills required to play at Expert level.
Although Normal mode is by no means easy, it balances the game’s difficulty in such a way that calling this game “impossible” is neither true or exactly fair anymore – which is why we have updated our review accordingly.
If you’re curious as to just how hard this game was without a Normal mode, we’ve left a few lines from our initial review below + you can always just try Expert mode because it is still super heard… 😂
For reference, we were hit with 3-4 different obstacles all at roughly the same time which certainly didn’t feel fair or even possible!
As reviewers, we would rather not go into whether or not this game is “actually” impossible or not, because that isn’t the point. Making payers think that the game they are playing could potentially be impossible is a real hit for a skill based game like Lunch Break no matter how simple the concept is.
To Ashley’s credit, Lunch Break is by far the best game we’ve seen in the Chris Series so far. Not all developers choose to listen to feedback from players and reviewers, which is why we are not only excited to see the changes made to better the overall user experience in Lunch Break – we are both honored and thankful that Ashley chose to listen to our rather strict comments.
We would be lying if we said Lunch Break is the best game we’d ever seen.
That having been said, with a way better user experience than when we first published our initial review, Lunch Break is now not only a game we can recommend, it is also a game we are confident Ashley will continue to improve on and make better, which is kind of the most important thing when it comes to Indie Games. 😉
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